Las Vegas is known for a multiplicity of things. Gambling. Transience. Heat. Solitude and isolation. Freakery. Global tourism. Indulgence. The triumph of spectacle, celebrating the celebratory. Somewhat recently, in the last five to ten years, prior to the November 2016 election of President Donald Trump and the October 2017 tragedy of the Mandalay Bay mass shooting, in the realm of literature the Nevadan metropolis of Las Vegas has become an examination room and a battleground, a kenoma in which writers have elucidated an elegiac donnée, one that refracts the soul (or soullessness) of an America enamored with the effervescence of the eternal present.
The city’s literary history is rarely insular, often regionally inscribed by its proximity to Los Angeles, an hour by plane or four hours by car, calling to mind Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970). It is the consummate desert city, defined by long, scorching summers and unremitting drought, essentially adjacent to the Southern Californian high desert, Death Valley, the Hoover Dam, and the Colorado River. It is a one-of-a-kind oasis, but it is also part of the American southwest. Book-wise, it is most readily associated with Hunter S. Thompson’s much-loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), novel-ish in structure, avant-garde in execution, a cult-classic exercise in self-invention. The genesis of gonzo journalism, a freakier version of the non-fiction novel in the aftermath of Capote and Mailer, but drug-doused, thus kin to Kesey, Thompson’s opus can also be categorized as Social Criticism. The nineties saw the success of John O’Brien’s 1990 novel Leaving Las Vegas, followed by a film adaptation five years later that brought the author’s distinctively bleak semi-autobiographical stylings to the screen. In recent years, three major works employ Las Vegas as a setting for literary fiction: Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), and the tentpole of the New Vegas novel, Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children (2008). (...)
Uniforms of all types, not just military ones, proliferate more in Las Vegas than in most cities. Remembering Thoreau’s dictum, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” Abani takes pleasure in blurring, puncturing, and deconstructing clearly identified roles. The casino/hotel/resort employees are decked out in the trimmings of their trade as bellhop or desk clerk, pit boss or baccarat dealer, maid or gift shop employee. The female self-objectification-for-money hierarchy runs from cocktail waitress to stripper to hooker, each with her own particular costume. The tourists also love to play dress-up in the Southern Nevadan citadel, women donning a mini-skirt or a cleavagy black dress, men sporting a blazer and jeans at the steakhouse with the fellas, or visor and fanny pack at the pool with a little age hampering their gait but never dimming their glad-to-be-there grins. As one can imagine, Halloween on the Strip is a singular and revelatory forum for revelry. And of course, the other type of raiment that is every bit as prevalent as that of the scantily clad over-the-top get-ups or the soldier boys in their finery, is that of the brides and grooms, wedding parties trailing behind, whether lavish and quasi-celebrity at a ballroom inside The Wynn, or cheap and fast—like the subjects of Didion’s Saturday Evening Post essay “Marrying Absurd” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)—at one of the old downtown chapels all wicker and white paint, kitschy and pseudo-quaint. (...)
Las Vegas is a sunny place, hardly ever even cloudy or overcast, but its landscape and its paradigms are rarely clear. It is hard to find reality. The superficial is as rampant as the heat, and the constant commerce is as much of a glut as the slow-moving pedestrians and the always waiting lines of cabs and limos, and even the Strip itself, the literal sidewalk, is often buried beneath discarded handouts, fliers, and baseball card–sized advertisements for escorts. Las Vegas as a setting for the literature of social comment has only been lightly studied; it remains under-utilized, far from exhausted.
In an August 2014 issue of LA Weekly, Henry Rollins writes, “In many ways, Las Vegas is the ultimate statement of Homo sapiens. Not Coltrane, not NASA or literacy. This assault on nature is one of the most obscene attempts to tame the wild. It is a massive concrete, steel and pavement tantrum.” It is as if everybody knows that Washington D.C. isn’t really the capital anymore. Sure, there’s still a plentitude of power suits, the agglomeration of mid-Atlantic wealth, the Machiavellian allure of politics typified by Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood in House of Cards, but it’s not the most American of cities, it’s not the most popular or the best-known. It’s a relic, a studio lot for CNN, talking heads with landmarks hovering in the background like something out of a much-reused sixth-grade textbook. The modern-day United States is condensed into instantly recognizable symbols, as portrayed through the media, social or traditional, old or new, in all their hyper-linked and instantly gratifying versions. And though the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building and the White House are well-known edifices, they don’t quite encapsulate or semiotically signify, not in the way that the Manhattan skyline or the Hollywood sign serve as American archetypes.
For the latter half of the twentieth century, those two port cities, N period Y period and L period A period, were America’s benchmarks and bookends, but the twenty-first century may more appropriately be compared to Las Vegas, Nevada and all its cartoonish glory. Where the booms and busts hit first and hardest (chronicled in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (2010) and its 2015 film adaptation). Where the American empire sends you on vacation or to a conference. William Chalmers’s book America’s Vacation Deficit Disorder (2013) stipulates, via a citation of the MMGY Global/Harrison Group’s 2012 Portrait of American Travelers, that only 9 percent of U.S. residents are even interested in international destinations, so Las Vegas provides a Cliff’s Notes version of the world, a more comfortable brand of tourism, without the massive time shifts, language barriers, and xenophobic fears inherent to international travel. “L.V.” says you don’t have to go to Paris and put up with those snooty French people to see the Eiffel Tower or to order a baguette from an ersatz boulangerie. You can experience the thrill of a tropical isle without the interference of child beggars and that depressing drive through the dilapidated slums on the way from the airport. The photogenic amenities of Venice are available without the stink of the canals, and the gondoliers backgrounded in selfies kick back for a Krispy Kreme donut or a Coors Light after work.
Las Vegas has acknowledged America’s fame obsession and is vending it. The illusion of being a somebody. You get to be whatever you want and, better yet, you get to leave it there. Hide from your job and your boss and your kids, shed your skin and let out that inner slouching beast. Yeats got the city wrong, but he was right about the desert. Las Vegas is a place where the temporal and the ephemeral are morphed into insta-culture, a palace of assimilation that’s open twenty-four/seven. There is no past or future, no need for perspective or long-range thought, there is only the unending now, the new promised land, a most codified place, a domain of myth and ritual.
The city’s literary history is rarely insular, often regionally inscribed by its proximity to Los Angeles, an hour by plane or four hours by car, calling to mind Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970). It is the consummate desert city, defined by long, scorching summers and unremitting drought, essentially adjacent to the Southern Californian high desert, Death Valley, the Hoover Dam, and the Colorado River. It is a one-of-a-kind oasis, but it is also part of the American southwest. Book-wise, it is most readily associated with Hunter S. Thompson’s much-loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), novel-ish in structure, avant-garde in execution, a cult-classic exercise in self-invention. The genesis of gonzo journalism, a freakier version of the non-fiction novel in the aftermath of Capote and Mailer, but drug-doused, thus kin to Kesey, Thompson’s opus can also be categorized as Social Criticism. The nineties saw the success of John O’Brien’s 1990 novel Leaving Las Vegas, followed by a film adaptation five years later that brought the author’s distinctively bleak semi-autobiographical stylings to the screen. In recent years, three major works employ Las Vegas as a setting for literary fiction: Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), and the tentpole of the New Vegas novel, Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children (2008). (...)Uniforms of all types, not just military ones, proliferate more in Las Vegas than in most cities. Remembering Thoreau’s dictum, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” Abani takes pleasure in blurring, puncturing, and deconstructing clearly identified roles. The casino/hotel/resort employees are decked out in the trimmings of their trade as bellhop or desk clerk, pit boss or baccarat dealer, maid or gift shop employee. The female self-objectification-for-money hierarchy runs from cocktail waitress to stripper to hooker, each with her own particular costume. The tourists also love to play dress-up in the Southern Nevadan citadel, women donning a mini-skirt or a cleavagy black dress, men sporting a blazer and jeans at the steakhouse with the fellas, or visor and fanny pack at the pool with a little age hampering their gait but never dimming their glad-to-be-there grins. As one can imagine, Halloween on the Strip is a singular and revelatory forum for revelry. And of course, the other type of raiment that is every bit as prevalent as that of the scantily clad over-the-top get-ups or the soldier boys in their finery, is that of the brides and grooms, wedding parties trailing behind, whether lavish and quasi-celebrity at a ballroom inside The Wynn, or cheap and fast—like the subjects of Didion’s Saturday Evening Post essay “Marrying Absurd” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)—at one of the old downtown chapels all wicker and white paint, kitschy and pseudo-quaint. (...)
Las Vegas is a sunny place, hardly ever even cloudy or overcast, but its landscape and its paradigms are rarely clear. It is hard to find reality. The superficial is as rampant as the heat, and the constant commerce is as much of a glut as the slow-moving pedestrians and the always waiting lines of cabs and limos, and even the Strip itself, the literal sidewalk, is often buried beneath discarded handouts, fliers, and baseball card–sized advertisements for escorts. Las Vegas as a setting for the literature of social comment has only been lightly studied; it remains under-utilized, far from exhausted.
In an August 2014 issue of LA Weekly, Henry Rollins writes, “In many ways, Las Vegas is the ultimate statement of Homo sapiens. Not Coltrane, not NASA or literacy. This assault on nature is one of the most obscene attempts to tame the wild. It is a massive concrete, steel and pavement tantrum.” It is as if everybody knows that Washington D.C. isn’t really the capital anymore. Sure, there’s still a plentitude of power suits, the agglomeration of mid-Atlantic wealth, the Machiavellian allure of politics typified by Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood in House of Cards, but it’s not the most American of cities, it’s not the most popular or the best-known. It’s a relic, a studio lot for CNN, talking heads with landmarks hovering in the background like something out of a much-reused sixth-grade textbook. The modern-day United States is condensed into instantly recognizable symbols, as portrayed through the media, social or traditional, old or new, in all their hyper-linked and instantly gratifying versions. And though the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building and the White House are well-known edifices, they don’t quite encapsulate or semiotically signify, not in the way that the Manhattan skyline or the Hollywood sign serve as American archetypes.
For the latter half of the twentieth century, those two port cities, N period Y period and L period A period, were America’s benchmarks and bookends, but the twenty-first century may more appropriately be compared to Las Vegas, Nevada and all its cartoonish glory. Where the booms and busts hit first and hardest (chronicled in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (2010) and its 2015 film adaptation). Where the American empire sends you on vacation or to a conference. William Chalmers’s book America’s Vacation Deficit Disorder (2013) stipulates, via a citation of the MMGY Global/Harrison Group’s 2012 Portrait of American Travelers, that only 9 percent of U.S. residents are even interested in international destinations, so Las Vegas provides a Cliff’s Notes version of the world, a more comfortable brand of tourism, without the massive time shifts, language barriers, and xenophobic fears inherent to international travel. “L.V.” says you don’t have to go to Paris and put up with those snooty French people to see the Eiffel Tower or to order a baguette from an ersatz boulangerie. You can experience the thrill of a tropical isle without the interference of child beggars and that depressing drive through the dilapidated slums on the way from the airport. The photogenic amenities of Venice are available without the stink of the canals, and the gondoliers backgrounded in selfies kick back for a Krispy Kreme donut or a Coors Light after work.
Las Vegas has acknowledged America’s fame obsession and is vending it. The illusion of being a somebody. You get to be whatever you want and, better yet, you get to leave it there. Hide from your job and your boss and your kids, shed your skin and let out that inner slouching beast. Yeats got the city wrong, but he was right about the desert. Las Vegas is a place where the temporal and the ephemeral are morphed into insta-culture, a palace of assimilation that’s open twenty-four/seven. There is no past or future, no need for perspective or long-range thought, there is only the unending now, the new promised land, a most codified place, a domain of myth and ritual.
by Sean Hooks, 3:AM Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited
